The present disclosure relates to the monitoring of a blind spot zone of a motor vehicle. In particular, a device for signaling an object in the blind spot zone of a motor vehicle and a motor vehicle equipped therewith are described.
Motor vehicle drivers, in particular drivers of commercial vehicles, are influenced during travel by many different stimulants in the surroundings of the vehicle (for example a construction site or a stop), which the driver must monitor and to which the driver must respond in the event of danger. In addition, a driver of a commercial vehicle must pay attention to numerous internal messages (for example, error messages or assistance systems) and external messages (for example, dynamic traffic signs, special signals from emergency vehicles or telephone calls), and, thus, there is a risk of not hearing or of mistaking some of these signals.
This risk is particularly serious during a lane change on multiple-lane roads, since other vehicles can be located in the blind spot zone of the motor vehicle or can rapidly approach and, thus, be overlooked. In order to minimize this source of danger, a lane-change assistance system (also referred to as a “blind spot assistance system”) is utilized in many passenger vehicles and trucks; this system outputs warnings about other vehicles in the blind spot zone.
Document DE 10 2005 054 972 A1 describes a driver assistance system for blind zone monitoring. In order to reduce the number of driver warnings, a check is carried out before a driver warning is output, in order to determine whether a lane change can be carried out on the basis of the given traffic infrastructure. Driver warnings are suppressed if the result of the check is that a lane change is not possible.
This assistance can indeed reduce the risk of accident, but only when the corresponding warning signal is correctly interpreted by the driver and is not mistaken, is indeed heard, or is not ignored. The conventional warning signal is an arbitrary acoustic signal, however, in the case of which this source of error is not ruled out, due to the numerous other internal and external messages which surround the driver.